We Are Hunted, the Billboard of the social web, has launched a new page to show users the 99 most popular tracks as determined by Twitter users.
As music and music video sharing become ever more popular (and supported by third-party services and apps) on Twitter, musicians and music fans have yet another set of metrics to determine virality, popularity, and trending of specific tracks. So, how do the folks at We Are Hunted nail down what’s hot now using only Twitter?
We Are Hunted’s Nick Crocker told us the new page’s results are determined by “sampling Twitter throughout the day looking for tweets that indicate someone is listening to or playing music and analyzing these tweets in our semantic engine.”
In other words, the engine doesn’t track mere mentions of an artist or song, but looks for evidence that the song is getting airtime in earbuds; we can speculate that the engine tracks events such as Blip.fm and Last.fm updates in Twitter streams.
“By combining this data with the insights from our global charts [i.e. the charts that sample all other social web sources], we calculate the live Twitter chart,” Crocker continued. “More than just a count of artist mentions, the We Are Hunted Twitter chart reflects which artists are being played most by Twitterers.”
Interestingly, the general social web and the Twitter charts are almost entirely divergent. The top 40 on the Twitter chart represented a slightly vintage bent and included Pink Floyd, the Doors, Bob Dylan, The Cure, older Metallica, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin, as well as a smattering of ’90s grunge tracks. Could this be because Twitter users’ average age runs slightly older than average ages on other social networks?
We’ll guess this is the case and blame the large numbers of young users for the Jonas Brothers appearing at #13.
